12/19/2007 @ 11:00AM

The Real Fake Steve

Last summer, every member of the media thought they knew something about the identity of Fake Steve Jobs. But no one agreed. Some were sure he was British. Others swore he must be an
Apple
employee.

No one, not even his own boss, suspected mild-mannered Forbes reporter and editor Dan Lyons. Even after he was outed by TheNew York Times in August, it still seemed impossible that Lyons could be the anonymous blogger using the persona of Apple’s
CEO to mercilessly skewer the tech industry, the media, and most of all, Jobs himself.

Lyons was, after all, the anti-blogger. In 2005, he had written the Forbes magazine cover story “The Attack of the Blogs,” a piece about bloggers who “spew lies, libel and invective” and permanently damage companies’ reputations. That made Lyons, to many, the ultimate old-media stalwart.

In fact, the 3,200-word article had actually launched Lyons’ alter ego. “The piece got really bashed in the blogosphere,” says Lyons. “And some of the feedback was legit. I started to think that as an old media guy, instead of fighting this new thing and feeling threatened by it, maybe we should be trying to learn something from it.”

Hoping mostly to learn more about blogging software, Lyons experimented with a few personal Web journals before settling on a perspective that would allow him to inject opinions on music, movies, computers, gadgets and even politics: the sharp and mercurial mind of
Steve
Jobs
Steve Jobs
. Within six weeks, he was surprised to find that he had attracted more than a thousand devoted readers. “I guess I’d forgotten that Apple has such a rabid fan-boy base,” he says.

Page views grew to more than a million a month as “The Secret Diary of Fake Steve Jobs” filled out, developing a cast of characters based on Silicon Valley moguls like the Beastmaster (
Bill
Gates
Bill Gates
) and Faceberg (Mark Zuckerberg). It also gave birth to its own vocabulary: Open-source advocates became “freetards,”
Microsoft
simply “the Borg.”

At the center of the fictional world was Lyons’ caricature of Jobs himself, a Machiavellian, mono-maniacal, petulant dictator–the perfect mouthpiece for Lyons’ own take on the news. “It turns out that people really like getting the day’s news from a wise-ass,” he says.

Since his identity was revealed in August, Lyons hasn’t given up that mouthpiece. In October, he published a novel based on the blog, and he is currently in talks with Fox to create a television show–something Lyons says would be like The Office in Silicon Valley.

And despite the lack of anonymity, an unmasked Fake Steve Jobs spews more vitriol than ever before. In recent posts, he’s rallied against Mark Zuckerberg’s “non-apology apology” for Facebook’s privacy blowup, mocked tech blog Valleywag for shoddy reporting and even accused an eWeek reporter of plagiarism. Like a digital Stephen Colbert, Lyons says he uses his satirical megaphone to speak his mind in ways he never could as a magazine writer.

“I’ve realized I can actually tell the truth with this blog,” Lyons says. “I can be real in a way that I really couldn’t within the constraints of the mainstream media.”